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Short takes | Lima Company heroes honored

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Monday February 11, 2013 5:56 AM

Ohioans can honor heroes by visiting a Statehouse memorial to the 23 fallen servicemen of the
Columbus-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. The memorial will be in place
between Friday and March 17.

“The Lima Company Memorial: The Eyes of Freedom” is a moving tribute created by Westerville
artist Anita Miller, who had a vision one night several years ago about a way to honor one of the
hardest-hit units in the Iraq war. Miller financed it with a home-equity loan and private
donations.

Two and a half years later, on Memorial Day 2008, it opened in the Statehouse Rotunda where it
stayed until Veterans Day. Life-size paintings of the 22 Marines and one Navy corpsman are arranged
in an octagon so that visitors feel they are in the midst of the company. Over the six months,
visitors left hundreds of items at the exhibit: letters, photos, children’s drawings, military
medals and other mementoes.

Since then, the exhibit has traveled around the country and now has returned to Columbus. See it
to gain a better appreciation of the magnitude of the loss and to offer thanks for their
sacrifice.

Industrial waste might be

key to curb toxic algae

Using the byproduct of one pollution problem to solve another would be doubly satisfying; an
Ohio State University scientist’s idea for using power-plant waste to neutralize algae-causing
phosphorus deserves a try.

The scrubbers used in coal-fired power plants produce millions of tons every year of sludge
consisting mainly of gypsum, the mineral used in plaster of Paris. Some of it goes to make drywall,
but most is dumped in landfills, with the potential to contaminate groundwater.

Soil scientist Warren Dick’s idea is to spread the gypsum on farm fields, where it would bind
with phosphates. This causes the phosphorus to stay in the field rather than being washed into
ditches, streams and eventually lakes, where it feeds the growth of toxic cyanobacteria, also known
as blue-green algae.

Massive algae blooms in recent years, especially in Grand Lake St. Marys and the shallow western
basin of Lake Erie, have sickened people and pets and hammered the commercial-fishing and tourism
industries.

The key to relief lies in drastically reducing phosphorus run-off. Farmers are encouraged to use
different fertilizing and tilling methods and reduce the use of manure in the frozen months when
runoff is worse. Spreading gypsum — which would have the added benefit of enhancing the
fertilization potential of the phosphorus — could be a powerful new tool.

Making sure the sludge isn’t contaminated by the heavy metals produced in the coal-burning
process is essential. Early indications are good; a spokesman for the Environmental Integrity
Project, a group critical of power-plant pollution, declared, “The test data on gypsum is pretty
good in terms of its being something that would have a low probability of harm.”

Dick plans to test gypsum this year on about 30 farms in the Maumee River watershed, the conduit
for most of Lake Erie’s phosphorus. Good luck with the experiement.